GAM111: Continue the SHMUP!

Back to work on the SHUMP and we have made this simple, plain looking game into something that looks like something people could really enjoy! Adding graphics to the SHMUP have made it look oh so much better and with the space ship now looking like a space ship the game feels so much better!

First off! When changing the look of the game to look like a proper game, we added a spaceship model to the player instead of a simple cube (already looking better!). We also added in a skybox to change the background from a plain grey to a much more suitable space setting. The enemy was changed from a white box to an enemy space craft. Sort of alien like to add to the space theme. These couple of changes made our game look so much better and helped to give the overall game a better feel to it.

We also made the enemy objects chase the player, creating some form of challenge for the player. Making it harder for the player to hit targets and allowing the player to potentially take damage. The enemy takes into calculation the players position and follows it’s target to the bottom of the screen. Once it hits the bottom of the screen, the enemy is destroyed. If the target takes enough damage from the player they will also be destroyed. So if the player lands enough shots on the enemy with either their lasers of missiles, the enemy will be destroyed.

One thing that I found rather cool was how we kept the player inside the screen. By using gameManager.xBoundary and gameManager.zBoundary it was a lot easier than I had thought it would be. By getting the boundary of the screen so easily we were able to simply check if the player had crossed the line of the boundary and reset their position to the camera boundaries edge. This can come in very handy for other things like detecting if the players mouse is close the the boundary and move a camera within a game.

A lot of Simple RTS games use this camera style moment. When ever the mouse reaches a certain point on the screen, the camera moves accordingly. Age of Empires, a game that I have been playing recently uses this type of camera movement. I think it works rather well and makes the game easy to play with something so simple. Even though it is over looked when playing games, it is essential for many games to function to uphold players expectations. I would like to experiment further with different types of camera positioning and potentially have the spaceship flying around in a certain area with specific camera restrictions.

Looking further into camera movement and restrictions, I have found something that I think is rather interesting. When controlling a character from a sky view, setting up a good tracking camera is always important to how the game plays and looks.

In this tutorial, a great example of this camera movement can be implemented within an overhead type of game. The tutorial goes over how to use certain conditions in the game to adjust where the camera is and the angle it should be directed.The code runs checks with an array on the player position and determines if the camera is in the correct place and if not it re positions according to certain conditions given to it in from a loop that checks a ray cast from the camera to the player and makes sure there isn’t anything between them. If there is, the camera will move to try and fix this problem. This kind of feature is always needed in a game to make sure that the people playing can enjoy a not only fun but fluent game.